LabBook April 19, 2013

We know, it’s been a long week. If you’re on campus you can take a load off at the new Starbucks in the Center for Care and Discovery.

Welcome to LabBook, our weekly roundup of University of Chicago Medicine & Biological Sciences research news from around campus and the internet. Each Friday, LabBook will recap the week on the blog, link to news stories about our faculty and studies, and briefly summarize a handful of recent publications by our researchers.

THIS WEEK ON THE BLOG

Busy week on the blog, starting Monday with a Washington Post op-ed by Harold Pollack, Helen Ross professor at the School of Social Service Administration, on the stalled fight against HIV in the US. He looked at the reasons why the rates of new cases have stayed at the same levels since the 1990s, and what prevention strategies could be the most effective.

This week we also announced two major gifts to fund big data biomedical research at the University of Chicago. The gifts from the Frank and Segal families will support the creation of a new Institute for Computational Biology and Medicine and a smaller project focused on using genomic data to help patients with pancreatic cancer.

On Tuesday I spoke to Nicholas Hatsopoulos and Aaron Suminski, two researchers in the Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy who are working on a way to improve the performance of robotic limbs that are controlled by brain impulses by predicting future movements of the arm.